We’ve got a great gift horse but so many people feel so compelled to look him in the mouth.

Looking for what? Signs of impurity. And, while examining the candidate for the minutest impurities, and dragging them out to say, “See! I knew he wasn’t for real!”

A lot of this is just the tension of choosing a candidate. I’m pretty sure that we all will come together behind whoever gets nominated.

But I think that the majority of suspicion/hostility towards Obama comes from an emotinal reaction to his style. Many activist Democrats are very well informed (even obsessively) and very, very focused on policies and issues. I know that I am like that. I think that, in general, people who are very concerned, about and well informed about, issues tend to be immune to and suspicious of charisma. The assumption is that, if a candidate is appealing to emotions, then the candidate must be a fake, an empty suit, or untrustworthy.

And quite often charismatic candidates are fakes. Of course, quite often politicians who talk issues are fakes, too.

Bottom line is that people like us don’t determine the outcome of elections. To win an election the Democratic candidate needs to get the support of people like us AND the support of people who process information very differently and response to stimuli very differently than we do.

An awful lot of people respond to perceived trustworthhiness. They vote for the candidate that they like as a person. To me, that’s a dumb way to pick a President, but the fact is that many people do vote that way and you can’t win with out them.

Obama has that appeal. He’s a gift to us, a winner. So I don’t give a flip if there is petty little difference between his proposal on an issue and Edwards’s–Congress writes laws anyway, not Presidents, and I don’t care if I, personally , don’t like charisma–other people do.

We’ve got three good candidates. Hillary is handicapped, in my opinion, by history. She is too traumatized by abuse to be able to correctly identify where the center is in politics any more. Edwards is, in my opinion, a great guy who says the right things, but he doesn’t seem to be catching on outside our base. Obama is, in my opinion, in between Hillary and Edwards in terms of his positions, but he is a house on fire politically. People like him, people who were either indiffferent to politics or new to politics, people who wouldn’t normally vote for a Democrat, and people who always vote for Democrats, hell, the press even likes him.

So I don’t see much point in the carping and suspicion. He’s a great candidate. Let’s win.

The fact that the younger voters and the independents came out in such high numbers is indeed a repudiation, not of the democratic candidates but of what the modern republican has delivered.

And Obama has been echoing right-wing talking points in calling for Social Security reform.

But you are sort of right - in the Kos reader polls, Obama is consistently second, trailing only Edwards.